“By 'open access' to the literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
OA and OER are cousins and share the fact that they are openly available to make sharing knowledge easier.. However, while being closely related, they were created for different purposes. OA are created to provide open access to resources (mainly for scholars and researchers) but do not address copyright. OER are resource used for educational purposes and are licensed with a creative commons license or are in the public domain.
For more information about OER, please visit the OER guide.
